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Monday, May 5, 2014

In Honor of Mothers and Grandmothers everywhere.... On the Red Porch With the White Striped Awning

In honor of Mother's day, I would like to post a short story I wrote some time ago. I've been blessed by the women in my life, my grandmothers and mother as well as my aunts. Each taught me different life lessons and portrayed aspects of the woman I would become. My own mother, a very strong woman, taught me to speak my mind, to stand up for myself, to put family first. My grandmothers were also pillars of strength, models of kindness and servitude. Their generation was so steeped in self-sacrifice. These women gave up everything for their children and families. It was just their way.
As I get older, I wonder about my grandmothers and who they were as women before they became wives and mothers. Did they ever yearn for more or question their choices? Did they have choices? I never asked way back when. I can't ask now.
This story is a testament to those women who endured hardships so that the lives of their children and grandchildren could be easier. Oh how I wish I could thank them.

3 generations making our beloved great grandmother's homemade ravioli. We've had them every Thanksgiving for as long as I can remember.

On The Red Porch with the White Striped Awning

On
the red porch with the white striped awning, she sat in her wooden folding
chair, watching the city morning come to life. Business men in their suits
rushed past her, anxious to meet their day’s sales,to land the hot deal, to pocket that crispy
dollar. She smiled at the contrast of their frantic bustle to her quiet sigh
inside the noise.

The huckster stopped his truck in front of her porch.

“Morning, Mary.” He nodded up to her, the rim of a baseball cap
shadowing his smile.

“Hi Sam.” She stood from her chair. “You wanna cup of coffee?”

“No thanks, Mary. Gotta keep moving this morning.” He grabbed two boxes
of fruits and vegetables from the back of the truck and hurried to a house
across the street to make his delivery.

“Have a good day, Sam.” She sat back down and crossed her hands in her
lap, her thumbs worrying the deep wrinkles on her knuckles and the sides of her
fingers.

Time had taken its toll on her body, leaving lines whose origins could
be traced back as far as her childhood.As
a dirty-cheeked pre-adolescent, she’d worked the land on Sicilian hilltops,
plucking figs and prickly pears from scorched September trees. The wrinkles on
her face spoke of summers that were anything but kind. Only the coolness of the
Ionian sea, its gentle fingers lapping over her skin, had allowed tranquility to flow over her during
those intense harvest seasons. She’d left her childhood there, inside a pebbled
footprint along the shore. Traded it in for more lines.

The more recent lines had been painted by a fabulous artist, a man whose
passion wasn’t always tender. At first, his hands had left her speechless and
immobile, so full of what she’d once called love. Later, they became brutal
like the Sicilian summer sun, leaving her with bruises as purple as a starless
sky. She’d had to bear many a shameful morning on account of his relentlessly
passionate hands. Her husband may have become quite famous, could have been
named the most prolific linear artists known to man, had he not met his fate by
the bottle.

The day he’d died was the beginning of her “year of the black dress.” On
day three hundred sixty-six, she’d donned a gorgeous shade of blue with shoes
to match. She’d paid her wifely dues of tradition and had at last felt owed her
due of serenity. The blue dress spoke peace to her. It was the color of the sea where she’d left
her childhood. It was the color of her firstborn’s eyes.

She’d nearly lost him. They’d tried to take him from her arms just as
she was introducing him to his world. Those women of black and white silence
who couldn’t even see past their rigid traditions to find the shades of gray
that made up life’s most important choices. How could they have comprehended
the color of unfettered innocence, the love in its most basic incarnation, that
exists between a mother and her child? They’d reached for him, to remove him
from her breast, to insert him into their colorless world. The glare her eyes shot
forth drew lines upon her forehead so deep they could never be erased. And, at
that moment, those cursed black and whites saw red and understood. The lines
she acquired that day… they may have saved her life.

Later came more babies, some with blue eyes, others with black, those
who slept soundly and the ones who wept and shrieked from the moment the moon
met the night until the sun kissed the sky. Seven became a lucky number for
her, and each child left lines of laughter, lines of tears, smiling lines and
lines that told the story of a worried brow.

There was never much money to be spoken of. No frantic business man
bustling into town to find his fortune. Oh her breadwinner was excitable,
though! Fridays, he was as frantic as a blinded soldier, running in circles in
search of the fastest route to the local tavern where he could drink up all of
the bread.

Charity always managed to rescue them though. Each of her little angels
learned through toil and, perhaps some lines of their own, to make smart
choices. None had chosen passionate linear artists who specialized in black and
blue to accompany them on life’s journey. Not one of her babies had taken up
the bottle. And, each knew the value of their creases – the ones on the faces
of themselves and their mother as well as the green ones in their pockets.

Now, she ran her hand along the thin lines in her cheek and leaned over,
resting her chin upon her fist, squinting from the sun’s glare. If every line
had been for naught she wouldn’t be able to sit here on the red porch with the
white striped awning, awed by the beauty of normalcy and quite happy with the
nothing and everything that was hers.

“Why the grin, neighbor?”Eva
poked her gray-haired head out of the door of the row house that was attached
to Mary. These connected homes had made it easy for her daughters to sneak out
of the attic window at night and hop across rooftops to visit the boys down the
street. They thought she didn’t know, but she had the lines to prove she’d
known all along.

Mary smiled up at her neighbor. “Eva, good morning.You wanna cup of coffee?”

“I have a doctor’s appointment this morning, Mary.”

“You all right?” Mary asked.

“Just a check on my sugar. I’ll see you tonight then.” Eva slipped
inside and closed the door.

Each night, about a half hour before dusk, the neighborhood ladies would
congregate on Mary’s porch. They shared stories, bragged about their
grandchildren and sometimes played Pokeno, an Italian bingo game. All of these
women had wrinkles on their faces and hands, much like those Mary’s life had
left to her. The wrinkles spoke of sorrowful legend, amazing bravery, and
hideous tragedy. They told tales of joy and of fear, and, although they’d
changed faces from young to old, from vibrant to withered, not one of these
women would make the choice to erase a single line.

Mary wouldn’t trade one of hers for all of that young businessman’s
money, not for a thousand more days at the sea.She licked her finger and rubbed it across a dirty mark on her blue shoe.
For all the years she’d suffered through their making, she’d survived on the
hope that someday her blacks and blues would give birth to gold.

“Hi Nana!” The little brown-eyed girl burst outside through the front
screen door and into Mary’s arms, sticky balls of sleep still stuck in her
eyes.

“Good morning, bella.”

The smiling little girl cupped her grandmother’s face in her tiny hands
and planted a kiss on the bridge of her long nose.

“Why are you so wrinkly, Nana?” The little girl laughed, and Mary’s
heart leapt at the lovely honesty of an innocent child.

“Because I love you, little one.” It was the only answer she had.

The little girl tilted her head to the side and seemed to search her
grandmother’s water blue eyes. “Will I have lines like this someday?”

“Not as many as I have.” Mary
brushed a sweaty lock of hair from the child’s forehead.

For a moment, the granddaughter’s eyes quizzed Mary’s, seeming tempted
to ask further but finally deciding not to. “I love you too, Nana.” With that,
she hopped off of her grandmother’s lap. Can we have pancakes for breakfast?”

Mary touched the soft cheek of this angel child. “We can have anything
we want, bella.”

The two left the red porch just as the sunlight was starting to reach
its fingers beyond the white striped awning, violating its shade. As the screen
door slammed shut behind them, Mary thought once more on her lines and her
lineage. Nothing was for naught, she thought, and squeezed her granddaughter’s
hand.